


Remember Me (At The Chelsea)

by notionally



Category: Day6 (Band)
Genre: Brian/Younghyun/Young K-centric, Canon Compliant, Casual Sex, Friends With Benefits, M/M, and the fear of being forgotten, and wanting people to remember you, just a meditation on fame, the chelsea hotel is a metaphor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-08
Updated: 2019-07-08
Packaged: 2020-05-30 16:02:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19406659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notionally/pseuds/notionally
Summary: The Chelsea Hotel had always meant a lot more to Brian than to Sungjin.





	Remember Me (At The Chelsea)

**Author's Note:**

> written for JYP JUKEBOX, and inspired by Fall Out Boy's 'Twin Skeleton's (Hotel in NYC)'

The man named Brian stopped just across the street from the building he had come all this way to see. His companion stopped with him, turned to inspect the imposing red brick building, and its heavy wrought-iron railings.

“Is that it?” Sungjin asked. 

Brian nodded. He’d known it was a large building from the pictures, but somehow it looked even more oppressively huge in real life. He craned his neck up to get a proper look.

“This is it,” he replied, unable to keep the tinge of awe out of his voice. “Hotel Chelsea.”

“Huh,” Sungjin said. “Can we go inside?”

Brian shook his head. “It’s closed for renovations,” he replied. “Has been for years now.”

“Huh,” Sungjin said again.

He got the sense Sungjin wasn’t as impressed by it as him. Not that Sungjin wasn’t happy to be here. It was just that — the Chelsea Hotel had always meant a lot more to Brian than to Sungjin. Not the building, but what it symbolised. Even the fact that it was closed to the public just added to its mysterious allure. How it stood tall and proud and glittering with fame and history, but completely unknowable from the inside.

“Who’s your favourite Chelsea Hotel guest?” Sungjin asked, later that night. They were sharing a room and a six-pack of beer. The other three members of the band were in their own room across the hall. Brian hadn’t told them about his and Sungjin’s little excursion.

“There are so many,” groaned Brian, rolling over onto his back, stretching out across the double bed. One of his arms flopped across Sungjin’s lap. Sungjin didn’t make to move it, and so neither did Brian. “Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix. Joni Mitchell. Cher!”

Sungjin just laughed, took a sip of his beer. “Pick one,” he insisted.

And so Brian did. He’d always known what his answer would be, anyway.

“Leonard Cohen,” he said, sitting up and twisting round to look at Sungjin. “He had an affair with Janis Joplin there, and wrote a song about it.”

“Trust you to go for the sleazy story,” Sungjin teased.

“It’s not sleazy, shut up.” Brian picked up his beer, took a swig. “It’s — romantic.”

Sungjin raised an eyebrow at him. “Having an affair is romantic?”

“No, not romantic as in  _ romance,”  _ corrected Brian. He fiddled with the tab on his beer can, trying to figure out what he meant. “Romantic as in,  _ artistic.  _ Having a night of passion and then using it to stoke the creative fires. And then becoming famous enough to have that story turn into a something of myth.”

He looked up at Sungjin. 

“Huh,” Sungjin said.

  
  


* * *

  
  


They slept together that night, the man named Brian and his companion named Sungjin. Not that it mattered, in the end, or that it meant anything. It was just the beer and the dim light and that stubborn, magnetic pull of the Chelsea Hotel.

“Do you think we’ll ever be that famous?” he asked, that night, stretched out underneath the covers and naked in the darkness. “Like Leonard Cohen and Janis Joplin famous?”

Sungjin scoffed lightly. “You better not write a song about the sex we just had.”

“I only write music about  _ good  _ sex,” Brian replied, without missing a beat, earning him a kick in the shins. 

He laughed, rolled over so he was half lying on top of Sungjin, and buried his face in the side of Sungjin’s neck. Maybe if he hid his face he could pretend he was someone else, someone who wasn’t insecure and afraid and always yearning for something more. He didn’t mean to, but a heavy sigh slipped past his lips.

“Bri,” Sungjin said, softly. His hands, large and slightly cold, came to rest on Brian’s back. It sent a shiver through Brian’s body. “Are you okay?”

Brian hummed, and attempted a shrug. “Scared,” he mumbled. It wasn’t something he would ever admit to anyone else. Probably not even to Sungjin in the daytime. But it was dark, and for once Brian let the crow out of its cage, the one that kept droning on and on about how he would never amount to anything worth remembering.

“Scared that we won’t make it?”

“Yes,” Brian replied. “And scared that we will.”

Sungjin didn’t say anything for a bit, just slid his hands across Brian’s back, until his arms were curled tightly around Brian’s torso. Brian wasn’t a small man, by any means, but Sungjin was broad, and solid, and made Brian feel safe in a way that he wasn’t used to feeling.

“We’ll be okay,” Sungjin said, firmly. So firmly that it sounded almost as if he was saying it to himself as much as he was saying it to Brian. “No matter what. We have each other. All of us. We’ll all be okay.”

Brian nodded. “Don’t let go.” His voice was muffled against Sungjin’s pillow.

“I won’t, I promise.”

But Brian pulled away, unconvinced. He propped himself up on his hands, one on either side of Sungjin’s head. “Seriously,” he insisted. “Not like Rose promising to hold on, then dropping Leo into the ocean once the rescue ship arrived.”

Sungjin laughed. He reached up, carded his fingers through Brian’s hair. “Okay,” he said. “Not like Rose. I promise.”

They were just friends — the best of friends — and bandmates. Young and anxious and holding on to each other. That was all.

The man named Brian had always been the kind to let his feelings about one thing get tangled up in his feelings for another.

  
  


* * *

  
  


New York was the first time. It wasn’t the last.

“We can't keep doing this,” Sungjin said, but even as he did his hands were grabbing at Brian's shirt, fingers — those guitar-playing fingers — deftly undoing the buttons that stood between him and the man hidden behind them. Maybe Sungjin needed him as much as he needed Sungjin, Brian thought. Maybe.

“Just tonight,” said Brian. It was a lie. Both of them knew this. It had been ‘just tonight' every one of these nights since New York.

Brian tugged Sungjin's shirt off, hands sliding up his chest and coming to rest on either side of Sungjin's face. He pulled Sungjin in for a kiss, greedy and desperate, teeth knocking and tongues licking into each other like their lives depended on it.

Some nights, the creature living deep in Brian’s gut would crawl up into his chest, claws digging into his lungs. It would hiss cruel words that set his body aflame, that sent the acrid taste of failure into his mouth. 

Those were the nights he would find himself at Sungjin's door. 

He never needed to say a word. One look at his face and Sungjin would pull him into the room, into his embrace. 

Brian always wondered what it was that Sungjin saw when he opened his door. Was it his fear, his self-doubt? Or maybe it was the emptiness Brian carried with him on those nights, when he couldn't even be sure if he was who he thought he was any more.

Being with Sungjin made him feel whole again, even if just for one night. 

So he arched his back into Sungjin, hands clawing desperately at Sungjin's back, begging for more —  _ more, more, more. _ And Sungjin always gave it to him, and it was always never enough.

Something hot prickled at the back of Brian's eyes, stinging like acid, and it took him a few blinks before he realised he was crying. He gasped out brokenly, chest constricting even as he rocked his hips up into Sungjin.

“Bri,” Sungjin said suddenly, stilling above Brian. “Bri, are you — are you crying?”

A choked sob forced its way out from Brian's lungs. “No, no, it's fine,” he mumbled. Twisted beneath Sungjin, trying to get him to start moving again. “Please,” he whimpered. “Please don't stop.”

Sungjin hesitated for a moment, but then he was reaching up to wipe Brian's tears away, and doing as he was told. And because he understood Brian, understood what Brian needed, he went hard and fast until Brian couldn't focus on anything except being here with Sungjin, their bodies pressed up against each other, slick with sweat and desire. Couldn't focus on any of the overlapping voices in his mind, or the darkness threatening to consume him from the inside out. 

“Do you want to talk about it?” Sungjin asked, after. The two of them lying on their backs, like children on a field stargazing, except there were no stars and they weren't children any more.

Brian forced a laugh. It sounded bitter. “What, about you fucking me so hard I started crying?”

Sungjin turned his head, just his head, to look at Brian. “You know what I mean.”

And so he did. Brian hummed softly. “No,” he replied. “I don't talk about feelings, I just write songs about them.”

Sungjin paused, as if trying to figure out if he should take Brian seriously, then seemed to decide that Brian was joking. He chuckled. “Okay,” he said. “You're mad, but okay.”

He had been joking, sort of. But another part of him was thinking about Leonard Cohen, and Chelsea Hotel #2, and whether that song would ever have been written if he and Janis Joplin had laid in bed after the act,  _ talking. _

Better this way, Brian thought. The silence trembled around him. Better this way.

  
  


* * *

  
  


“You're obsessed.”

The man named Brian didn't even look up from his guitar. “Thank you,” he said, continuing to pick out a melody on the steel strings, humming beneath his breath.

Sungjin stared at him. “I'm taking you home,” he declared, as if his words meant anything. Brian ignored him. The notes weren't coming out right. He couldn't make the music say what he wanted it to say.

“Seriously, come on,” Sungjin insisted. He reached down, grabbed hold of Brian's arm where it was wrapped around his guitar. 

Brian snatched his arm away like he'd been burnt. “Will you leave me alone?” 

His voice, the glint of a knife held up to a throat. The silence that began to congeal around them was thick like treacle. Brian could feel it seeping across his skin, creeping down his nostrils, crawling into his lungs.

“You haven't been home in two days.”

“We need a hit song,” Brian said, speaking around the leaden weight of his tongue. “We need this.”

The look in Sungjin's eyes was hard, and cold as steel. “No,  _ you _ need this.”

Brian felt himself physically recoil, his shoulders hunching as his arms tightened around his guitar.“I'm an artist,” he said. He was, he was. “When Leonard Cohen—”

“ _ Fuck  _ Leonard Cohen.”

Sungjin's jaw was so tightly clenched, Brian could see the muscles standing out in his cheeks. 

“What is it that you're looking for, Brian?” Sungjin asked, viciously sharp. “What do you think you'll find at the other end of this tunnel?”

Brian’s fingers closed around the neck of his guitar. The steel of the strings dug into his skin. It hurt, but in a good way.

“Shut up,” he said. “You don't know what you're talking about.”

But Sungjin didn't shut up. Sungjin kept going, because Sungjin knew exactly where Brian’s buttons were and just how to push them. In all the best ways, but also in all the worst ways.

“Fame?” Sungjin asked, his voice dripping with derision. “Is that what you’re looking for? Or is it something deeper — like love? Or maybe you're hoping you'll find yourself, whatever that means.”

“Seriously, shut up.”

Sungjin scoffed. “This career — it's not a substitute. You can't just throw yourself into it and hope that it'll fix everything that's wrong with you.” 

“Fuck off,” spat Brian. He shoved the guitar off his lap, onto the sofa, stood up so quickly he got a headrush. His nerves crackled like sparklers, ready to ignite. “You have no idea what's wrong with me.”

“Maybe not,” Sungjin returned, icily. “But do you?”

They were standing really close to each other, now, but Brian had never felt further from Sungjin before. He raked one hand through his hair. “What do you want me to do, then? Go back to letting you fuck the existential angst out of me?”

Sungjin froze. “What?”

This was a two-way street. Brian knew how to push buttons too.

“You didn't seem to have a problem with my  _ ennui _ when it was getting your dick wet.”

Sungjin's eyes narrowed, ever so slightly. He had always been so good at control, in a way that Brian wasn't. But Brian knew him well enough now, to see the tension in his shoulders. The rigid set of his mouth. “That's not what that was about.”

Now it was Brian’s turn to scoff. “What was it about then? Love? You and I both know that's not true.”

“It doesn't have to be love to be something less — cynical. Than whatever you're making it out to be.”

There was nothing cynical about fucking to ward off the crushing despair of being alive. It was romantic, in a way. As in, artistic.

That's what Brian wanted to say. What he would have said, in an earlier time.

But Brian realised, in that moment, that Sungjin didn't understand. That he had never understood, and that he would never understand. Brian should have known this from the first time he'd taken Sungjin to see Chelsea Hotel.

“We should stop sleeping together,” was what Brian said, instead.

Sungjin stared at him, for a long — excruciatingly, torturously long — moment. Then he shrugged.

“Fine,” he said.

Brian stared at the door, long after Sungjin had yanked it open and walked through the doorway, long after it had slammed shut behind him. Nothing remained except — a pervasive lack of feeling. A numbness that crept into his bones and settled there like ash.

“I'm sad,” Brian said to himself. “This is sad.” 

He wasn't sure if he believed it.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Kang Younghyun is dead. Long live Young K.

  
  


* * *

He could still hear the crowd. 

Brian stood in the darkness of backstage, handing his guitar off to the crew members who swarmed around him, accepting face towels and bottles of water. Bright spots flared in his vision, afterimages of the blinding stage lights. His eyes were struggling to adjust.

The crowd, chanting their names.

Not just their names.  _ His _ name.

He supposed it was appropriate, that they were back in New York. The myth of the Chelsea Hotel, the promise of something that would last, still calling to him like a siren song.

Brian heard the sound of his own knuckles rapping on the door. His feet, kicking against the carpet. Everything seemed like it was moving through a thick fog.

The door opening. Sungjin standing on the other side.

Brian had been here before. How different it had all been then, and yet — how very much the same.

The crowd was still chanting his name.

  
  


* * *

  
  


“Are we famous now?”

Brian didn’t turn around. He stared resolutely at the heavy curtains, drawn across the wall of glass that overlooked the city. Felt the bed dip as Sungjin climbed in behind him.

“They were chanting our names, weren’t they?”

Brian made a murmuring sort of noise. “For now.” 

Silence, for a moment, and an insidious coldness. Brian wondered, if he closed his eyes and never opened them again, whether he would cease to exist. Whether seeing and being seen were two sides of the same illusion.

“I don’t get you,” Sungjin said, finally. He turned over onto his back, the mattress shifting beneath them as he did so. The covers slid down, exposing Brian’s bare shoulder to the cold. He tugged it back up over himself. “Is this really what you want to talk about? Right after having sex? When we said we wouldn’t sleep together, not anymore?”

“What else do you want to talk about?” asked Brian, hollowly. “Argue again about whether or not we’re in love?”

Sungjin exhaled heavily. “You’re the one who came to me.”

“You could have turned me away.”

“You know I could never do that.”

And what else was there to say? Sungjin was right, and they both knew it. Brian closed his eyes. The room was dark, but he could still see the flashing stage lights behind his eyelids, dizzyingly bright. 

“What name do you think they’ll remember?” he asked, abruptly. 

“What?” Sungjin sounded like he’d been on the brink of falling asleep. “What do you mean?”

“My name,” repeated Brian. “Which one will they remember?”

“Does it matter?”

Of course it mattered. Of course it  _ fucking mattered. _

“Yes.”

“Which one do you want them to remember?”

_ Kang Younghyun, _ he thought. 

“Young K,” he said.

Sungjin turned away from him. “Then that’s the one they’ll remember.” 

  
  


* * *

  
  


The next morning, Brian woke up before the sun rose. Sungjin was next to him, breathing softly, his shoulders rising and falling with each inhale and exhale.

They would have to leave the city in a matter of hours. Brian didn’t have much time, but he had enough. And that was all he needed. Enough.

So he pulled on a hoodie, and a baseball cap. Stepped out of the room, out of the hotel. Wound his way through the eerily silent city streets, hopped onto one train then another.

The man named Brian stopped just across the street from the building he had come all this way to see. He stared at the red brick — more a rusty brown from decades of collected grime. At the wrought iron railings, peeling with age. The building looked smaller, less imposing, than he remembered.

He stayed for a long time, just looking. 

It was only after he felt a tear leak out of the corner of his eye that realised — the ache he felt in his chest was pity. For a fucking  _ building. _

Except it wasn’t for a building, was it?

“Huh,” Brian said.

Then he turned, and left. 

The man named Brian never came back.

**Author's Note:**

> fan opinion is that 'Twin Skeleton's (Hotel in NYC)' was written about the Chelsea Hotel, and about Leonard Cohen and Janis Joplin's affair there. Cohen wrote 'Chelsea Hotel #2' about his encounter with Joplin - and that just felt like the kind of romantic, artistic legend that would draw Brian in. not to mention the countless famous people who have stayed at the hotel. it made me wonder what Brian would make of the whole thing, and how that might interact with his reflections on the meaning of fame. I hope you liked it as much as I enjoyed writing it! please leave kudos/comments if you did :)
> 
> [twitter](https://twitter.com/notionxally) | [curiouscat](https://curiouscat.me/notionxally)


End file.
